Complex clinical solutions consist of multiple different application systems that work together and are interconnected to provide information to each other to ensure that the various pieces of the solutions, and the solutions as a whole, function properly. One issue with complex systems made up of various application environments is interoperability, which is the ability of the various application environments to connect and communicate readily with one another, for example even if they were developed by different manufacturers or are built on different platforms or coding languages. In complex solutions, the ability to exchange information between applications, databases, and other computer systems is critical, and the various systems and devices that make up those solutions must be able to exchange and interpret shared information. In clinical solutions, interoperability is the capability of disparate applications and systems to exchange and share information from a range of sources, including labs, clinics, pharmacies, hospitals, and medical practices regardless of the applications or software systems being used by those applications.
Conventionally, clinical systems are designed and configured individually for communication. Each application system has its own configuration and maintains its own configuration files, which are different for each application system, i.e. they are not consistent. As such, if there are changes to any of the application systems or their configuration, the entire solution can fail to operate properly and subsequently requires substantial manual research and updating as there is no way to know the dependencies of each application system, what needs to be updated in each application system (e.g., what values need to be updated), and where those updates need to be made (e.g., where those values are stored with respect to the application system). Further, it becomes an arduous manual process to link new application systems or move application systems. There are difficulties with current interoperability techniques to retrieve and apply configuration information, for example many clinical solutions depend heavily on application system versions and it is difficult to determine which versions of the application systems are available and what configuration options they are implemented with, and as such it requires manual tasks to figure out the state of the various application system environments and a lot of research to figure out the correct configuration values to use for those application systems.